NaiʻaUlumaimalu Lewis

Decoding our creative inheritance.

Coming up

Tending the Turn · Winter Solstice

Sunday, December 20, 10:00 a.m. Hawaiʻi time, online. Free.

Register ↗
Ancestral Daemon, a watercolor and ink figure with antlers like tree branches, roots below, and a spiral sun, by Naiʻa Lewis
Ancestral Daemon · watercolor and ink

Four doors into the work.

Salted Logic pattern: yellow hand-drawn triangles with the black ink ring and triangle mark

Salted Logic

An Indigenous women-owned creative studio in Honolulu: media, art, and design.
Studio Wā wordmark

Studio Wā

A temporal studio for time and cultural frameworks, and home of my courses.
The iMahina app's Today screen, showing tonight's pō and its hand-drawn moon

iMahina

Studio Wā's set of lunar tools. The app is coming to the App Store in November.
Panels from the Kaʻahumanu mosaic mural, laid out side by side

Art and murals

Illustration, watercolor, and the Mosaic Mural Process.

Gallery

Braiding Sweetgrass, digital art by Naiʻa Lewis: hands braiding sweetgrass across a valley of bright color bands
Braiding Sweetgrass · digital art, made for the Omidyar Foundation
Nānā Pono, watercolor, pencil, and ink by Naiʻa Lewis: a tree rooted in water beneath a full moon and clouds
Nānā Pono · watercolor, pencil, ink, made for the Omidyar Foundation
Colored-pencil drawing of a group of figures in turquoise and green, three with red hearts, by Naiʻa Lewis
Colored pencil
Ink and color drawing of a face folding into feathers and a rainbow eye, by Naiʻa Lewis
Cover art for Hūlili
Haumea, a colored-pencil face of flowing color, spirals, and an ʻiwa in flight, by Naiʻa Lewis
Haumea

Made by many hands.

The Mosaic Mural Process is how I make art with groups. One image is divided among many people, drawn panel by panel, then assembled into one work.

Commissions are by invitation through Salted Logic.

The Kaʻahumanu mosaic mural: many hand-drawn panels assembled into one image of a figure within rings of color
Kaʻahumanu · mosaic mural, many hands
Naiʻa Lewis, her long gray hair streaked with purple, blowing across her face Naiʻa at her drawing table, pen in hand

Aloha

I'm Naiʻa, an artist, founder, and systems thinker in Honolulu, with more than thirty years across art, education, communications, facilitation, and guardianship of the natural world.

I mentor the next generation of leaders, in my own company and at Big Ocean. For twenty years my work also turned toward the ocean, including the IUCN guidelines for large-scale marine managed areas. The full record is on LinkedIn ↗.

Necessary Labor

Words are spells. Necessary Labor is my writing on culture, time, and the labor of making meaning. My poems and the studio's living memos share a shelf called Expressions.

Visit Expressions ↗